My Most Irrational Post Ever. Plus? Hot Chicks.

“Cassandra, in Greek legend, was condemned to know the future, but to be disbelieved when she foretold it.” – Twelve Monkeys

Proof that Jerry Lee Lewis was psychic with at least one of his songs:  A man from Florida was arrested for dipping his testicles into salsa.

One of the simplest geometric forms is a triangle.  It’s just three points and the lines that connect them.  See?  Simple.  Elegant.  The only thing simpler is a circle, but we’ll get to that, at least in passing.

The Greeks were crazy about math, like a geometry teacher on meth and Adderall® who was also genetically spliced with the Taco Bell© chihuahua, and loved dividing things.  Every time they divided something, though, they got either a whole number (1/1=1), a fraction that ended (1/4=0.25) or a fraction that repeated the same number or sequence of numbers forever (1/3=0.33333333…).

See, simple rules.

Rational output.  Literally rational output, because the numbers could be expressed as a ratio.  That’s actually where the word rational comes from:  if something can be expressed by a ratio of whole numbers, it’s a rational number.  In these combinations of numbers and ratios, these Greeks saw the perfection that came from a designed universe, a place where things made sense.

The one cult died out at ate-a-Glock™ in the morning.

And that was important, since math was a cult back then.  Yes, an honest to God, Waco-level showers-optional cult based as near as we can tell on math, mysticism, vegetarianism, reincarnation, and politics.  Since they were vegetarians, we know that they had poor grip strength and were shunned by women.  Basically, its as if they put your high school math club on an island for six generations and made them wear togas.

Triangles, though, eventually ended up driving the Greeks crazy, even crazier than the hot chicks they couldn’t get to talk to them.  Actually, it wasn’t the triangle itself, but what happened when they started thinking about the simplest right triangle, one with two sides that are 90 degrees apart, and are only one unit long.

What’s the hypotenuse of that triangle?

Well, Pythagoras figured it out. With the old a2+b2=c2, the Pythagorean Theorem®, right?  Turns out that it had been developed as early as 1300 years before Pythagoras became a Grecohipster by the Babylonians.  I guess the Babylonians had bad press.

Enough history, back to the hypotenuse.

If a=a2=1, and b=b2=1, then c2=2.  Easy.  That means that c is equal to the square root of two.  Or the speed of light.  But let’s stick with the square root thing.

Funny thing is that their friends were imaginary, too.

Some weak, protein-starved pale Greek from the cult of Pythagoras was able to prove that the square root of 2 was irrational.  It goes like this:

Assume that the square root of 2 is rational. That means we can write it as a fraction of two numbers p and q that have no common factor:

Square both sides to eliminate the square root:

The right side is clearly even (it’s 2 times something), so p² is even.  The square of an odd number is always odd, and the square of an even number is always even.

Therefore, if p² is even, p itself must be even.  So, we can write p = 2m for some positive integer m. Substitute this back in:

Now the left side is even, so q² is also clearly even.

By the same logic as before, q itself must be even. But now both p and q are even, that means they share a common factor of 2.

This directly contradicts our starting assumption that p and q have no common factors

Therefore, the original assumption must be false:  the square root of 2 cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers.

It is irrational.

I know it’s irrational, but I do love pumpkin pi.

This baked the gourds of the cult.  Rumor has it that they kept it secret and may have even killed to keep it a secret.

This was where the word irrational came from.  But the word in our language came from a concept of a number can’t be expressed as a ratio.  So, before my ex-wife even existed, people were talking about the word irrational.

The square root of 2 is thus irrational.  So are a lot of other numbers, like pi.  The Greeks thought pi was irrational because they kept making bigger and bigger models of circles with smaller and smaller units and could never come up with a ratio that made sense because the denominator kept getting bigger, also like my ex-wife.

But here’s the part that bakes my gourd.  The square root of two never ends.  It’s been calculated to more digits than the weight of my ex-wife in grams, and that’s a lot, and it looks to be very random.  But since it goes on forever . . . that means my social security number is in there.

And so is yours, if you have one.

Those Gen Z kids have a lot of nerve, always walking around like the rent the place.

Everyone’s social security number is probably there.  And if you did something crazy like do a substitution into a different mathematical base (I used base 28) and have it map to the alphabet plus a comma and a period instead of numbers, you could have something like this for the first 400 digits of the square root of two:

AKPTVWWMVL,BOOLWLVQY..RDWM.BHVFYCFJMIAHGIU.EYMXWLPWZ.V.NT.AUBXB.UEGICHKTBRYATPCKPPUFOPWLDTVOOISWJKN,FJGOHZESKBQHPAKZ.OZHSFTPFZRQDTYDN.N.HCSTLQYYQK,HVKIQQGHYMEYDOMPGFSNNMHJAKSHC,,F,YWKSBJLQPAFZGRDMCEIXQGPVQ.NUEQOLDYFGFSRJPR.WMAXMV,NNSGRIGPGKPKGLXSCQR,SYFPHQCJXEMUEWLHOUMDSSMYDAVNXTFWOC,YBNZHBN.GNIHXSU.UBB,CHQCOATUL.AYPALBNAFHOD.ZQB,SHIWDZPCZIM.OL.TRUP.XGJLEWUUIZTCOHXBNUXGVCSVMUPFFHCBJCWMVTUXSNWHSNS.

You could even map it into the ASCII code that I’m typing in, but I was too lazy to do that, but the Sumerians calculated it in base 60 which may have made them more insane even than the Greeks.  But the good news is that every post I’ve ever put up (or ever will put up) is available in the square root of 2.  In order.

That also means that, rolled up in an infinite number is every possible thing that could ever exist.  Every thought that could ever be had.  Every .jpg of Kathleen Turner.

Don’t look up current pictures.  She’s gone into Kathleen Turner Overdrive.

All of it.  In one number.  And in an infinite number of random irrational numbers, like pi.  The Greeks couldn’t prove pi was irrational because they didn’t have calculus until one of them was reincarnated as Newton.

Now, the downside is that we have no index to where everything is sitting the square root of 2.  Where, exactly, all of my posts are besides my hard drive and on the server of the hosting company are unknown.

But they’re there.

That means that everything that is, ever was, or ever will be is compressed in a single number, yet to us, also unknowable because we don’t have the index.  Infinities are embedded in some of the simplest shapes in the universe:  that shape which defines a plane contains, well, everything.

But this is a little deep for a Friday.

Who wants to talk about hot chicks?

 

Singapore Got Rich on a Tiny Rock. We’re Getting Poor on a Vast Continent. Here’s Why.

I hate hipsters, with their vegan diets and tiny feet and whiskery faces and sawdust bedding.  Oh, I meant hamsters.  I hate hamsters. (meme as-found)

We are becoming poor.

Not “poor” in the sense of some third-world hellhole where the average guy eats dirt and dreams of a bicycle.  No, we’re sliding into a softer, slower, more insidious kind of poor, the kind where everything costs more, does less, and shrinks while the price tag stays the same.  Think of your new Giant Size™ Freetos© Corn and Sawdust Chips®.  Thirty-three percent less product than the old Stupendous Size©, same price, and now with extra cardboard flavor for that authentic “we’re all getting cancer” mouthfeel.

Or the Chimkin King® MacNugget© that used to be a glorious 0.75 ounces of protein-packed joy (roughly three picofarads of satisfaction) and is now a sad 0.4 ounces (two millibecquerels of regret).

Same price.

Or twice the price.

You pick.  This isn’t random.  It’s the visible symptom of a deeper rot.

I think Superman® will die when he finds his crypt tonight.

To understand why we’re getting poorer, let’s ask the question:  What makes places and peoples wealthy in the first place?  Wealth isn’t some mystical fog that drifts in on the winds of good intentions.  Wealth is built, deliberately, from a handful of non-negotiable ingredients.  Screw them up, and poverty is the only destination.  Nail them, and creation of wealth is damn near impossible to stop:  look at Singapore, a rock with zero natural resources that became richer than most continents because they got the recipe right.

Here’s the list.  It’s not complicated.

Raw materials.  You need stuff to make stuff.   A country doesn’t have to own the mines or the oil fields.  Taiwan proves that.  They import what they need and turn it into iPhones© and Nvidia© chips that the world lines up to buy.  Venezuela sits on more oil than a Saudi prince’s dream and still can’t afford luxuries like toilet paper or rice.

Energy.  This is the raw material people pretend doesn’t exist until the lights flicker.  Cheap, reliable energy is the multiplier for everything else.  Coal, oil, nuclear, geothermal, solar:  swap the source if you want, but you cannot negotiate with 12 shots of vodka or thermodynamics.  I may run on booze and condiments, but without abundant energy, factories sit idle, and data centers don’t compute.  When energy gets expensive, everything else gets more expensive.  Period.

Gasoline prices are so high that I heard the homeless in Southern California have stopped huffing it and switched to cocaine to save money. (snip as-found)

Capital investment.  You have to build things to build things.  Our entire world is a stack of prior investments stretching back to the pyramids, the steam engine, the transistor. AI doesn’t pop out Sam Altman’s ass:  it needs concrete, steel, copper, water pipes, motors, and enough electricity to power a small country.  Each of those required factories, that also required factories.  Every layer of capital makes the next layer possible.  Starve that pipeline for decades and watch the future evaporate.

Drive and ingenuity.  Someone has to have the spark.  Steve Jobs said it best:  the desire to “kick a dent in the Universe.”  Wanting it isn’t enough, someone has to be smart enough and stubborn enough to actually take the risk.  That’s the rarest ingredient.  Most people are content with Nyquil P.M.™ Netflix® and Nacho Cheese Doritos©.  The ones who aren’t?  They move mountains.

Labor and physical craftsmanship.  Ideas and Jeffery Dahmer are worthless without execution.  You need trained, experienced men who can turn blueprints into reality:  welders, machinists, engineers, coders who’ve solved hard problems before and aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.  Craftsmanship isn’t taught in a three-hour DEI seminar.  It’s earned through sweat, failure, and repetition.

My former wife didn’t understand algebra, which is why the x is no longer in the equation.

Right environment.  Enough government to stop anarchy, not so much that you end up with Pol Pot’s people party.  Singapore, South Korea, even old-school America had governments that mostly stayed out of the way while protecting property rights and contracts.  Too little law and warlords loot your factory.  Too much and the bureaucrats loot it for you.

Scoring system.  This is the secret sauce.  No scoring system at all?  Communism where everyone starves equally except the leaders.  All scoring system, no guardrails?  Wall Street cocaine binges off of hooker’s butts after their derivative play wrecked Poland.  Reward the leeches useless migrants unworthy rapists?  Hello, modern Europe, where the productive pay for the idle and call it “compassion.”  The right system rewards the creators, punishes the parasites, and lets the market sort the rest.  Mess with the incentives?  You get what you reward.

Get these seven things lined up and wealth explodes.  Miss even a couple and you’re Venezuela with better Wi-Fi.

So why are we sliding backward?

We’ve been neglecting every single one of them for decades, and the bill is coming due.

Raw materials?  We’ve got plenty underground, but we’ve regulated mining into a paperwork hellscape while China laughs and digs.  Or else.

OnlyFans© was outlawed in Orwell’s book 1984.  They wouldn’t allow thotcrime.

Energy?  We’re shutting down reliable coal and nuclear plants for windmills that work when the wind feels like it and solar that dies at sunset.  The result?  Higher costs for everything, from grocery bills to California electric cars that can’t charge because the grid is wheezing.

Capital investment?  We offshored it to China and called it “globalization.” Factories, machine tools, entire supply chains are all gone.  Sure, some capital flowed back in the form of stock buybacks and McMansions, but the productive kind?  That’s building Chang’s future now.

Drive and ingenuity?  Our schools turned into indoctrination camps.  Merit is racist, excellence is oppressive, and every kid gets a participation trophy.  The spark of genius gets smothered under layers of “equity.”  Steve Jobs couldn’t get hired at Apple™ today and with the regulations, couldn’t even start Apple© today.

Labor and craftsmanship?  We imported millions of low-skill workers who consume more in services than they produce in output, while our own kids rack up six-figure debts for gender studies degrees.  The skilled trades?  Stigmatized as “dirty jobs” for decades.  Now we wonder why nothing gets built on time or on budget.  Welding productivity is half what it was in 1960.

But we both liked heavy metal, so we eloped to Vegas for our welding.

Right environment?  We’ve got more government than ever regulations thicker than a Manhattan phone book (for the younger generation, a phone book was when someone printed off a section of the Internet), agencies with SWAT teams, and a bureaucracy that treats citizens like the enemy.  Pol Pot was too extreme, sure, but the slow-motion version where every productive act requires ten permits and a diversity audit?  That’s nearly as destructive.

Scoring system?  We reward voting for more handouts, not creating value.  Welfare cliffs, affirmative action, corporate bailouts, student loan “forgiveness” that’s really just sticking the bill on the productive.  Europe’s model of taxing the hell out of workers to fund the idle has crossed the Atlantic.  And don’t get me started about how we’re letting the people who print the money keep it.  The leeches are thriving.  The creators are exhausted.

Every one of these screw-ups shows up in the data:  houses that cost ten times what they should because we imported 100,000,000 net new consumers (legal and otherwise).  National debt? Every printed dollar dilutes the value of the ones you earned.  Shrinking products, rising prices, declining quality are all the same signal.

We’re poorer.

Stunningly accurate.  (meme as-found)

If we keep this up, we won’t be the world’s superpower.  We’ll be Albania on the Atlantic, the Mumbai in the Midwest, or the Pretoria of the Pacific Rim:  a place where the lights flicker, the shelves are half-empty, people burn Styrofoam® for heat and the ambitious either leave or give up.

The crazy part? Fixing it is simple.

Stop importing net consumers.  Secure the border, enforce the laws we already have and repatriate them all.

Unleash energy.  Drill, build nuclear, keep the coal plants running until the next better thing is actually ready since cheap energy fixes almost everything downstream.

Cut the regulations that strangle capital investment.  Let factories come home and encourage them to do so with tariffs.  Reward builders, not bureaucrats.

Rebuild education around merit, rigor, and actual skills.  Fire the ideologues.  Bring back shop class and calculus.

Restore the scoring system:  reward production, punish predation.  End the welfare traps.  Make work pay again.

That’s it.  All the fixes.  None require magic or a revolution.  Just the political will to stop doing stupid stuff.

So why don’t we do that?

Because the people steering the ship benefit from the decline:  a system is what it does.  Politicians get votes from the dependent class.  Bureaucrats get power from the red tape.  Corporations get cheap labor and cheap virtue-signaling.  The media gets endless stories about “systemic” problems that justify more of the same poison.

The incentives are perfectly aligned.  For them.

For the rest of us? Not so much.

The ingredients for wealth haven’t vanished; we’ve just stopped mixing the batter.  But the window is closing.  Every year of delay makes the turnaround harder and everyone poorer.

I wear shoes with Velcro® closers now.  I mean, why knot?

It will be painful, more painful than pulling putting duct tape on a Kardashian’s back and pulling it off.  For the Kardashian, I mean, since I would pay money to see someone pull duct tape off of a hairy Kardashian.

The alternative to the pain, though, is worse.

I am so tired of sawdust.

One Hour. One Dead 80-Year Math Problem. Welcome to the End of College As We Know It.

“Am I afraid of losing command to a computer?  Daystrom was right.  I can do a lot of other things.  Am I afraid of losing the prestige and the power that goes with being a starship captain?  Is that why I’m fighting it? Am I that petty?” – Star Trek

Plot idea:  Gilligan ate the last box of cookies on the island.  Ginger snaps.

My first exposure to the concept of thinking machines was almost certainly Star Trek.  My first exposure to talking monkeys was Planet of the Apes, but that’s a story for another day.

On Star Trek, the computers were always one bad logical paradox away from exploding.  Yes.  Literally exploding.

Were they sentient?  Sure.  Helpful?  Usually.

But give them an infinite loop and boom, here comes the smoke, and sparks.  The classic was something like Kirk saying, “Computer, listen to me.  I have infinite power, so can I make a burger that is too big for me to eat?”

The Star Trek A.I. that comes to mind right now is M-5 from the episode The Ultimate Computer.  In this episode, Kirk and his crew get replaced by this fancy new computer that runs the Enterprise™ like a dream until M-5 just decides to start killing people.  The machine went full neurotic.  And turning it off?  It took its creator have a full meltdown, since they don’t make Adderall for computers.

I spilled Adderall in my F-150, and turned it into a Ford Focus®.

I bring this up because an AI just solved an unsolved Erdős Problem®.  What’s an Erdős Problem® other than an excuse to us a Hungarian letter?  Well, it’s part of a series of math problems cooked up by a dead vagabond mathematician named Paul Erdős.  The guy wandered the world like a couch surfing hobo with a PhD.

This particular problem had stumped humans for eighty years.  Then OpenAI’s model rolled up and disproved the whole thing with a counterexample so elegant it made a human mathematician sit up and say, “Huh. That’s clever.”

Not “good for a computer.”

Just . . . clever.  People hadn’t solved this problem.  But A.I. did in about an hour.

Anyone who still says “AI is nothing more than a pocket calculator” is wrong.  Dead wrong.  This isn’t crunching numbers faster.  This is synthesizing ideas and creating original solutions to problems that have vexed mathematicians everywhere.  Oh, sure, it’s easy to beat them up and take their money to buy yourself something you like because they have poor upper body strength, but they’re good in math.

Maybe Kim wouldn’t be so chubby if he had to run for office.

Just like Kirk struggled with what the hell he was supposed to do if he wasn’t driving a starship the thought that has to be entering the minds of mathematicians everywhere is, “what’s the point if a computer can do what I do?”  Though, to be fair, Captain Kirk would later become a police officer in Southern California and a lawyer in Boston, so he landed on his feet after they no longer needed him in Star Fleet.  But he had decent upper body strength.

And that leads straight to the question of college.

College is getting pozzed by GloboLeftists to the point that math and engineering professors are publicly demanding a return to acceptance based on test scores.  They’re tired of getting stunning and brave students who can’t noodle their way through middle-school math and, well, can’t read either.  These are the same professors who used to pretend everything was fine because they were fighting for tenure.

What’s the difference between a tenured professor and Hamas?  You can negotiate with Hamas.  (meme as found).

They’re saying the quiet part out loud because their departments are filling up with kids who couldn’t pass a seventh-grade fractions test but have opinions on everything.  However, now we have A.I. that can solve unsolved mathematical problems.  And college students that can’t read or do math.

As I’ve written before, participation in college took off after Griggs v. Duke Power.  That 1971 Supreme Court decision basically told companies they couldn’t use IQ tests for hiring anymore.

Why?

Because black people didn’t score as high on average.  So how could companies legally discriminate, sorry, select, for the bright employees they actually needed to, you know, keep the power on?  Simple:  require a college degree. A degree became the new IQ test, just with more debt and fewer guarantees.

Now college is facing the twin problems of not being able to bring in the smart students or even requiring kids to read, while AI is everywhere.

What is college even for anymore?  What’s the purpose?

My experience with college is that it provided a chance for me to change.  The teachers always said, “next year it would be harder,” and it finally hit for me my second semester of my freshman year. Calc 2, Physics 2, and Chem 2 (the thermodynamics part) all at once.

I will say that when I took thermo I didn’t feel so hot.

I had to bear down and learn to study.  It changed me for the better.  The concepts I learned there were truly fundamental. They gave me a leg up on my career because they changed the way I thought and challenged me in ways that mattered.

But if college has turned into writing prompts (or, since they can’t write, speaking prompts) into an AI and turning in the A.I.’s product, what’s the point?  I know, people said the same thing about calculators dumbing down schools.  I’m sure they said the same thing about slide rules.  But I know what multiplication is and how it works, and could even do long division by hand if I had to.

A.I. is different, fundamentally, than a calculator.  A.I. can’t think in the human sense, but it certainly can synthesize and create original solutions to problems that have vexed the physically weakest people on campus.

So why college?

For most people, college shouldn’t exist.  Alternate paths should be wide open for entrepreneurship, or welding, or HVAC, or any of the dozen trades that actually keep the lights on and the toilets flushing.  People wanting a sociology, psychology, or anthropology degree should be limited to about one-twentieth the number of sociology, psychology, or anthropology professors currently working in the United States, because teaching those subjects is about all those degrees are worth in the real world.  Oops, forgot!  They could also work in the fresh retail coffee production and distribution industry.

I’ll go out on a limb and say college should be limited to those professions where people die if you’re wrong, or where the work is useful in making cool weapons, which means people die if they’re right:  physics, chemistry, engineering, medicine, the hard stuff.

I see why people get addicted to glue.  They just get attached to it.

My plan would turn subjects like Women’s Studies into a hobby.  Which is what they already are, but at least under my plan you don’t have to play $48,000 a year.  Add in allowing employers to use IQ tests again, and then you don’t have to worry about hiring idiots.  They might be evil, but at least they won’t be idiots.

Look, the M-5 computer on the Enterprise® eventually got shut down because it went off the rails.  And real A.I. isn’t going to explode in a shower of sparks, but it’s already doing things humans couldn’t.

College, meanwhile, is busy proving it can’t even teach basic literacy to the people it lets in.  The old model is broken.  Even my old professor, Dr. Zaius©, agrees.

Excalibur: The Movie The West Needs Now

“My pride broke it!  My rage broke it!  This excellent knight, who fought with fairness and grace, was meant to win.  I used Excalibur to change that verdict.  I’ve lost, for all time, the ancient sword of my fathers, whose power was meant to unite all men, not to serve the vanity of a single man.  I am . . . nothing.” – Excalibur

I tried to pull the sword from the stone, but I wasn’t Arthurized.

I rewatched Excalibur last weekend for the first time, likely, since Reagan was president and the phrase “press one for English” had yet to be spoken.

It was glorious, and better than I remembered, and that isn’t just the wine talking.  Excalibur came out in 1981, directed by John Boorman, who also brought us the underrated epic of Zardoz.  Any man who can talk Sean Connery into wearing an orange diaper for an entire film and likes guns as much as Boorman is okay.

Excalibur, however, features no orange underwear or guns.  It is, however, one of the most nationalistic, unapologetic, mythic, sword-swinging spectacles ever put on film.

To be clear:  it’s not a history lesson.  It’s a legend.

First things first:  no, the armor isn’t remotely historically accurate.  Plate armor like that didn’t show up until centuries after the real  Arthur would have been stomping around Britain in the 600s or 700s.  The knights look like they stepped out of a 15th-century tournament sponsored by the Stainless Steel Institute® instead of a muddy Dark Ages battlefield.

The wedding party lasted too late into the night for one of Arthur’s Knights.  Poor Sir Cadian.

Boorman knew this.  He didn’t care because Excalibur isn’t trying to be a documentary.  It’s a full-throated retelling of the King Arthur myth, the kind that’s been passed around campfires and tavern tables for more than a thousand years.  When I looked back at the overall King Arthur Literary Universe©, I found that there were endless characters and sub-characters and plots and mutually exclusive elements.

Boorman picked the main plot points of the Arthur myth perfectly.  As a result, the film knows exactly what it is:  a legend soaked in Christianity, fog, blood, magic, virtue, redemption, and destiny.

The critics, when it first came out, whined that the characters weren’t “complex” enough.  Arthur wasn’t nuanced.  Guinevere wasn’t layered and didn’t have a chance to prove herself on the battlefield as a Strong Independent Woman©.  Lancelot wasn’t a tortured anti-hero with a tragic backstory and three therapy sessions.

That’s the damn point.

They’re archetypes.

My favorite dessert at Thanksgiving is made by dividing a pumpkin’s circumference by its diameter:  pumpkin pi.

Arthur is the Once and Future King.  He is pure, flawed, larger than life and his failings are the point of the movie.  Merlin is the scheming wizard who sees the long game.  Morgana is ambition and vengeance and hotness wrapped in snakes, silk, and spite.  The film doesn’t waste time giving everyone a five-minute monologue about their feelings.

It trusts the myth to simply be what it is.

And with the exception of Helen Mirren, all of the rest of the cast in main roles flailed for the rest of their careers as B and C listers.  But in this movie?  Nigel Terry is Arthur.  Nicol Williamson is a Merlin that is so Merlin that I can’t imagine another person being Merlin.  In what probably saved their careers, you’ll spot Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne, and Patrick Stewart in roles that are nearly so brief you’ll blink and miss them.

The actors are the roles they were born to play, and the story moves like a river in flood.  That’s why it still works.

Part of the backstory is that Boorman wanted to make a Lord of the Rings movie, but thankfully couldn’t find anyone stupid enough to take the risk on a production far too large for its time.  Instead, he made Excalibur.

I imagine Father’s Day was uncomfortable around the castle.

Excalibur is a nationalist British film, made by a British director, for an audience that still remembered what a legend actually was.  Men were men.  Women were women.

Honor and virtue mattered.  Betrayal hurt.  Sex was raw and consequential, not a punchline or a sermon.  People with good motives weren’t ridiculed.

Boorman put his own flesh and blood into the movie, literally.  Boorman had to direct his own young and incredibly hot daughter in one of the more, shall we say, vigorous scenes in the movie.

Yeah.

Imagine Boorman as a director, talking to his daughter:  “Honey, can you just, you know, a little more passion on take three?  Hip thrusts, dear.”  To top it off, Boorman’s son played the young version of Mordred.  This is the family business, Boorman style.

The man didn’t just make a movie about myth, he co-wrote the screenplay, directed the film, produced the film, and he dragged his own bloodline into the forge.  No wonder the whole movie feels more alive than most things that have been made in the last decade.

That is why Excalibur feels dangerous somehow next to today’s polished, focus-grouped slop.

No one was trying to make Excalibur “relatable for modern audiences.”  No one was worried about alienating the overseas market or triggering the comment section.  No soulless Disney© corporate executive (but I repeat myself at least three times) was trying to make a tentpole for the Arthur Cinematic Universe© and have three more movies so they could triple the profits.

He just told the damn story.

You know I’m right.

The result is a film that looks like it was shot inside a stained-glass window:  every frame drips with atmosphere, every line of dialogue sounds like it was read off of a stone carving.  The classical music fills the spots perfectly.  The (very inaccurate) battles feel like they matter because the people swinging the swords believe in something bigger than themselves.

The movie is earnest.  The actors and writers and crew believe in the story they’re telling.

That’s the contrast that stings in 2026.  We’re drowning in corporate product:  remakes, reboots, and “elevated” retellings that strip out everything that made the originals mythic.

They give us complexity instead of clarity, messaging instead of meaning.

Excalibur reminds me why the old stories endured:  they weren’t about making transgender people or minorities feel seen.  They were about making people feel the weight of destiny, the cost of power, and the pull of something ancient and also something that was True, Beautiful, and Good.

Search for “Amelia Meme UK”.

So, if you haven’t seen it, you might correctly guess I’m a fan.  If you haven’t seen it in a while, give it another shot.  Pour something that Arthur would have quaffed, turn the lights down, put the damn phones up, and let the sword rise from the lake one more time.

In a world that’s forgotten how to tell legends, Excalibur still knows exactly what it is.  And just like King Arthur himself, there will never be another like it.

Let’s hope that Great Britain remembers Arthur’s words from the film:  “Now, once more, I must ride with my knights to defend what was, and the dream of what could be.”

Your Chatbot Is Cute. Theirs Is a Chained God. Here’s Why That Changes Everything.

“Have you ever seen the machines?” – The Time Machine (1960)

 

(all as-found)

I’ve been writing about A.I. for a while now, watching it go from goofy meme generators that couldn’t draw hands to something that’s theoretically (LINK TO ED ZITRON, who thinks it’s just a grift and has good points) eating jobs faster than Whoopi Goldberg can slam down a cheesecake.

However, the part nobody’s really talking about in the shiny TED Talks© and cable financial news talking head soundbites:  A.I. isn’t going to create a shiny utopia of universal luxury.  It’s going to split the world in two.

Again.

Only this time, the gap might make today’s rich-poor divide look like a disagreement over whether pineapple belongs on pizza in the comment section.

Right now, A.I. is democratic-ish.  I can hop on Grok™ or Claude® or ChatRPG© for a few bucks a month and get something that’s already much smarter than the pointy-haired boss in a Dilbert© comic strip.

It feels accessible.  But economics has a way of reminding us that “free” and “widely available” and “cheap” are temporary states like “sober” and “conscious” on New Year’s Eve.

The rich already live in a different reality.

Jeff Bezos even lives in a world that made him think his wife is attractive.  (meme as-found)

Think about it.  When’s the last time Jeff Bezos changed his own oil?  Has Elon Musk wandered the aisles of a grocery store lately, comparing prices on store-brand peanut butter versus the fancy stuff that isn’t made from off-spec styrene?  Probably not.

Their world is comprised of drivers, chefs, assistants, concierges, and layers of people who handle the mundane so they can focus on the tough business of being rich.  Breathing and, well, the other end of the digestive process are about the only things they share with the rest of us.

A.I. will supercharge that separation.

For the ultra-wealthy and national governments (which are basically the same thing at that scale), the A.I. of the future won’t be the public chatbot.  It will be a custom, proprietary, always-on system with access to individual datasets, massive private compute clusters, and real-time integration into their empires.  Imagine an A.I. that doesn’t just answer questions:  it anticipates needs across global supply chains, optimizes investments with keen foresight, runs entire divisions of virtual employees, and even simulates political and market outcomes with terrifying accuracy.

These systems won’t be running on shared servers in the cloud where your prompts might train the next version for everyone.  They’ll be air-gapped, secured, and jealously guarded.  Why share when you don’t have to?  And they’ll be created for maximum loyalty:  they will be, in essence, chained gods.

People they’re not building this for:  you. (meme as-found)

The rest of us?  We’ll get the consumer version.  The good enough.  Best Value® A.I.:  the one that’s rate-limited, censored in annoying ways, and always trying to sell me something or nudge me toward approved opinions.  It’ll be helpful for writing emails or generating images of cats on porches, but it won’t be the strategic weapon the elites wield.

This isn’t conspiracy, it’s simply the outcome of every technological advancement, ever, scaled to the size required by A.I.  The best models, the best hardware, the best data have costs.

Enormous costs.

The people who can pay will pay whatever it takes to stay ahead.  The split is already showing up in research papers and quiet boardroom discussions:  one track for the cognitive elite with private super-A.I., another for everyone else.

What has kept civilization and the elite in check has been the wide dispersion of talent that the genetic lottery of intelligence was in charge of:  talent.

Talent has always been the great equalizer.  A smart kid from a nowhere town could hustle, learn a trade or profession, and climb.  Companies needed human brains.  That paid for engineers, lawyers, marketers, analysts, and middle managers.  The path to wealth, while never easy, existed.

My biggest natural talent is sleeping:  I can do it with my eyes closed. (meme as-found)

When the rich have A.I. that can do most of that thinking better, faster, and without needing health insurance or vacation days, the demand for actual human talent craters.  Why should I pay a six-figure salary for a strategist when my private A.I. can simulate a thousand scenarios overnight?

The path to becoming rich effectively dies for 99.999% of humanity.

Not because people suddenly get dumber, but because the economic leverage of human capital evaporates for most.  The elites won’t need the vast pyramid of workers and consumers in the same way.  They’ll have their closed ecosystems.

Universal luxury from A.G.I. the benevolent master brain that creates enough wealth so we all get whatever luxury we want along with our private penthouses?

See, no free A.I.  (meme as-found)

That was always a fairy tale sold by people who want us to be calm while they consolidate power.  More likely is a world that looks like a high-tech feudalism:  a tiny class at the top with god-tier tools, a small retainer class to service them, and everyone else competing for scraps in an economy that doesn’t particularly need their labor or their spending.  This is the pattern history has shown us, and I see no reason that it would change.

We’ve seen such splits before.  The Industrial Revolution created massive wealth but also urban slums and child labor until society adjusted.  The internet promised to democratize information and ended up creating a few trillion-dollar companies while attention economies turned us into dopamine addicts.

A.I. will be bigger.

It hits directly at the part of us that separates us from being apes or, in for the French, poodles.  And when the cognitive tools are unequally distributed at this scale, the feedback loops get nasty.

Armageddon tired of all these rapture jokes. (meme as-found)

The elites won’t experience the same A.I.  Their versions won’t hallucinate on basic facts or refuse controversial topics.  It will be tuned to maximize their outcomes.  Ours will be tuned for engagement, safe ideas to keep the population docile, and for the extraction of more data.

What does this mean for regular folks?

First, stop waiting for the rising tide.  It’s not coming.

Build skills that are hard to automate or that the elites might still need humans for in the transition:  things involving real-world messiness, physical presence, trust, or creativity that can’t be faked at scale.  Yet.

Second, understand the game.  The split isn’t a bug for the elite, it’s the feature of late-stage capitalism meeting exponential tech.  The people at the top have every incentive to keep the best stuff private like they always have throughout history.

Third, maintain your own sovereignty.  No, not in the “this court doesn’t have subject matter jurisdiction” way but in the “keep thinking critically” way.  If you thought that Madison Avenue and the CIA knew how to persuade, imagine them with superhuman intelligence at their disposal.  Use the cheap AI tools while they’re useful, but don’t become dependent in ways that atrophy your own capabilities.

How did they train that cat to do all that??  (movie as-found)

The future isn’t written, but the trends are clear should A.I. succeed.  We’re heading toward a world where the rich don’t just have more money, they will become masters of reality.

The cultural and class divide we already complain about?  It’s about to get orders of magnitude wider.  Not out of malice, necessarily, but out of cold economic logic and the nature of power.

Or not.  As I’ve written recently, A.I. has caused what I believe to be the biggest bubble in the history of the world, and may pop with datacenters yet unconstructed and with billions in Nvidia© chips rotting in warehouses.

But, hey, why not both?  Why not an economy ending collapse of markets and the advent of godlike A.I. in the hands of the elites and government?  I can imagine Jeff Bezos having one of his factories making cheesecake for Whoopi Goldberg, and the machine going berserk and filling the entire island of Manhattan with cheesecake.  The horror!

The streets would be desserted.

Life Is Hard For A Reason. A Good Reason. Plus Hot Chicks.

“Life’s short and hard like a bodybuilding elf.” – Bloodhound Gang

Regardless, the people at his funeral will be called Paul-bearers.

I bought the book Dune by Frank Herbert when I was a kid.  I still recall buying it as it was on one of the monthly trips we took to the book store when we ventured off of Mount Wilder.  Ma Wilder was horribly indulgent when it came to books or other healthy creative outlets, like model kits.  Books had an unlimited budget around the house, and she never particularly cared which books, as long as I was reading them.  As such, at two or three novels a week from age 10 to 16, I read a lot.

I still do.

Dune was one of those.  I read it before I started driving.  I remember reading it in the time after finishing mowing Grandma Wilder’s lawn and before I was picked on a beautiful summer day decades ago.  One thing that struck me is the description in the book of the planet Salusa Secundus.  As a kid I mentally pronounced it “Salsa” Secundus, and, well, it is a pretty spicy planet.

I was told to bring an extra jar of liquid cheese, in queso-emergency.

In Herbert’s description, Salusa Secundus was a hell world, horrible weather, murderous beasts, extreme temperatures, awful terrain.  It was also the Emperor’s prison where he tossed away the worst criminals of his interstellar empire.  “ . . . the mortality rate among new prisoners is higher than sixty percent.”

Yet, here was where the Emperor got his fanatical and tough warriors, the feared Hardeharhar.  Oops, different book.  I mean the Sardaukar®.

Why there?  Well, if you could survive there, you could survive on any planet that a man could live on.  And if you could make it though the gauntlet of prisoners trying to kill you, congratulations, you survived the initiation process.

The guards at Big Ben in London look tired!  I guess they’re working around the clock.

The idea isn’t a new one.  The Spartans had a similar story, as retold by Plutarch, who, despite his name, was not Mickey Mouse’s™ dog:

Another boy . . . when some of his companions had stolen a young fox and delivered it to him . . . hid it under his gown; and though the angry little beast bit through his side to his very guts, he endured it quietly, that he might not be discovered.  When the searchers were gone . . . [his friends] chid him roundly, saying, ‘It had been better to produce the fox, than thus to conceal him by losing your own life.’  ‘No, no!’ said he, smiling, ‘it is better to die than to be detected in a base attempt at theft.’

Our teacher told us this story when I was in second grade.  Yes.  They told it in a somewhat different variation, but they were telling it to seven-year-olds.  No trigger warning.  No safe space.  Just a story about a kid who was so tough that he’d let a fox eat his intestines rather than show weakness.

I think I have an idea where Herbert took his inspiration for the Hardeharhar from.

But at the Best Buy© in Athens you can get advice from the Greek Squad©.

This is a story that resonates, and the deeper it resonates the truer it is.  We don’t become strong by being bathed in rose water and sleeping on satin sheets and eating our fill of lemon-cream PEZ© every day, and sailors don’t become captains on calm seas.

We don’t become emotionally strong by never facing hardship.

We don’t become physically strong by sitting on a couch.

We don’t live lives of purpose without getting bruised.  Any thing of purpose and worth that one might do will be opposed.  Period.  Either the odds are against it, the gods are against it, or other people are against it.  Sometimes all three.

These are the good fights, if founded in the True, Beautiful and Good.  These are the things that are worth the time and effort and pain.  These are the things that my scar tissue prepared me for.  A life that is based on something that Epictetus said:

Don’t you understand that amounts to saying that I would so prepare myself to endure, and then let anything happen that will happen?

An Epic Cow is really Legend Dairy.

That’s a strong statement.  And in a life filled with challenges, it’s hard to understand sometimes why we faced the challenges we did, why we have the scars and bruises that we do.  I think it’s because if they didn’t break us and they made us better prepared.  Yeah, even Nietzsche was right a time or two, if you include his magnificent mustache.

What then, does this leave us with?

We have today.  We have this moment.  We have the amazing gift that we can do anything we wish to right now.  We can make vows to change the world, we can dedicate (or rededicate) ourselves to fighting for what we know is True, Beautiful, and Good.

And that’s why we’re here.  We’re not here for comfort.  We’re not here for leisure.  We’re not here for quiet.  A quiet universe is a dead universe.  A universe without conflict is a dead universe.  A universe without purpose is a dead universe.

How much mass is in the universe?  All of it.

We do not live in a dead universe.  We’re breathing, fighting, aberrations, statistical flukes and inconvenient, stubborn fools fighting against entropy and common sense.  We see the world and keep going, because, deep down, we have our choices, our reasoned choices that allow us to get up to fight another day.

Or give up.

Me?  I choose to keep going, come what may.

Besides, now I’m hungry and am looking for chips and salsa.

Extra spicy.  I think I’m ready.

What Does A Bubble Look Like?

“I had it all, even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections.” – Fight Club

You know what really gets my goat?  A Chupacabra.

I’ve been in a bubble before.  What happens in them is, well, interesting.

First, the money isn’t just where the attention is.  Nvidia® and OpenAI™ and Anthropic© are where the attention is focused.  But it’s a bubble, right?  Honestly, if the irrational exuberance over A.I. was just about those three companies, it would be pretty boring.

But it’s not.  A bubble is insidious because it doesn’t impact just one part of an economy, it sinks its tendrils in seemingly unrelated things.  That’s good, because change is the basis of growth, creating new combinations in the economy to create value.  I’ll stress the “creating value” part because often that’s confused with “red line go up and to right good, down and to right bad”.  A stock price should be related to the value the company creates but is often masked, at least for a while.  I mean, Enron©, right?

Looking at the A.I. bubble now, well, it’s everywhere, and often in irrational and uncomfortable places, like the backseat of a Volkswagen®.

What’s got two legs and lives off a dead beetle?  Yoko Ono.

Things are built in places for reasons.  When things are being built in stupid places, well, it’s probably that someone isn’t thinking straight.

Let’s take data centers.  What do data centers need?

First, power.  We’ll get back to this subject (and most that follow) again, but unless there’s power, none of the chips run.

Second, space.  You need a place to put the chips.  It’s most often a building, on land.  Well, to be honest, that’s where it’s third most common.  The most common is in the dreams of Sam Altman, the second most common is in a warehouse because the datacenter hasn’t been built yet.

Third, access to robust communications.  You’re building something that has to listen and talk, so it needs to be hooked into the data sphere.  Thankfully, thanks to the Dotcom bubble, that fiberoptics are everywhere.

What the hell is laser hair?  And why do people want to get it removed?

Fourth, access to a place to dump the waste heat generated by all that electricity usage.  Most often, this implies access to water for use.

Each of these has its own solution, but meeting all four requires a bit of thought.  I mean, the South Pole would be great except for the whole “access to communication” bit.  So, selection is a balancing act.  Pacific Northwest, with power, land, water and data access, not so bad.  Pennsylvania?  Also pretty good.

Let’s take the factors, one by one.  Power.  As we’ve discussed before, the power usage for data center construction is screaming “bubble” from the top of its lungs.  People building data centers are signing contracts for power, either from utilities or by buying natural gas generators or . . . fusion?  Really?  That’s what they’re planning?  Why not power them off of Elon’s Tweets®?

Looks like even Buc-ee’s® went A.I.

Yeah.  It’s a bubble.  Just because Fred’s Datacenter Depot and Truck Stop© signed a contract doesn’t mean that they have money or even loans to build it.  Yet, chained investment is spurred on through public utilities and engine/turbine manufacturers.  They’re building new lines, expanding capacity, all for a level of power generation that’s absurd.  Thankfully, you can also get a Slim Jim™ at Fred’s©.

What about land?  These are the lucky ones, since people with hundreds to thousands of acres of land are able to sell the land for ridiculous prices if they win the data center lottery.  The nice thing for these folks is that they actually get paid.

Third:  communications.  There are a lot of fiber networks in the US, so this makes a lot of the country okay for buildout.  Greenland?  Notsomuch.

Besides, I have other plans for Greenland.

Then there’s water.  I use the Mississippi for a proxy cutoff line, since east of it, wet, west of it, dry.  YMMV, and there are places like the PacNorthwest that get a lot of water.

But Utah or Nevada?  Or Colorado?  Sure, these places get cold in winter, but are they even thinking about water usage?  These are the places where the phrase, “Whiskey is for drinkin’ and water is for fightin’.” came from.  They’re dry.

But, there’s a never-ending stream of data centers being announced pretty much everywhere.

Announced.

But my experience in a previous bubble tells me that all of these companies that are attempting to build all of these data centers are needing more in common than just millions of Nvidia© chips.  They’re needing copper for wiring.  They’re needing pipes to move water.  They’re needing concrete.  They’re needing steel beams.  They’re needing rebar and glass and aluminum to build some of the largest buildings every conceived by man outside of the Pyramids and that ballroom next to the White House.

And that’s just for the building.

What is the difference between USA and USB?  One connects to your computer to access all your data, the other is computing industry hardware standard.

They’re also in need of power.  That’s another Big Kahuna, and it’s already raising rates to consumers in various states as utilities plan to build out power plants to serve demand from data centers that . . .

May never be built because they can’t be built because there’s not enough stuff to build them or enough electricity to power them even though, “Hey, we have signed contracts!”

That’s the flip side of a bubble.  It’s irrational.  You end up with insanity like 87% of venture capital going to A.I.  49% of investment-grade bonds are going to . . . A.I.  As Michael Burry notes, during the Dotcom boom, only 40% of venture capital went to dotcom companies.  So, 87% is better and safer than 40% because it’s more, right?

I hear that farmers can use a hoe to make money honestly.

Things inflate because everyone wants them.

Copper.  Silver, which is (currently) not behaving like an economic metal, but like an input to data centers.  Concrete.  The very people that know how to build data centers are in amazing demand.

But a bubble?

Nah.  Don’t call it that.

I could go on for another three thousand words about how frothy we are at this moment in time, but this time really is different.  Most of this bubble is built on debt to build things that are impossible to build in promised timelines using resources that aren’t available.  At least when the dotcom bubble burst, we had lots of unused fiber optic cable in the ground and when the housing bubble burst, we had houses left over.

What happens when a debt bubble bursts that hasn’t built the data centers it promised and evaporates a huge percentage of the venture capital that was sunk into it and all we have left are mountains of Nvidia© chips sitting in warehouses surrounded by confused pimps?

Well, that’s just another way that A.I. will change the world, I guess.

Won’t that be interesting?

Chud The Builder And Two-Tiered Justice In America

“I got a new problem when I post bail.” – The Usual Suspects

“Chud the Builder” is an Internet provocateur/rage baiter who videos himself with strangers in public, often using racial slurs to black people.  His name is Dalton Eartherly, but I’ll stick with Chud.

Chud claims that it is within his free speech to say pretty much whatever he wants if he’s not threatening people.  I’ll leave it up to you to form your own opinion on that, but Chud isn’t shy about using the same words that black people use in songs to describe each other to them directly.

After going to court in Montgomery Coutney, Tennessee on a debt he owned, an altercation occurred.  I’d go into more details, but I’ve heard a lot of contradictory stories, so for now I’ll stick with that.  At some point, Chud drew his weapon and managed to get a two-fer:  Chud accidentally shot himself and he also shot a black man named Joshua Fox.  Both are alive.

There’s a lot to unpack with just this single case.  On X®, @RetroCoast said:

What?  $1.25 million?  I’ll admit that seems like a lot, but maybe that’s normal bail for Chud’s charge:  attempted murder.

Well, no.  In this age of free information flow, it’s now possible to get that data and share it quickly to millions.  OPERATION FREE DALTON went and got the receipts.

Outside of the scale being way off, it is clear that Chud’s bail is excessive compared to the average of $40,625 (hang on, I’ve got that in my other pocket) for other attempted murder cases.  It’s 31 times the average, assuming the data is right.

This was already a complicated case that touched on free speech and the right of self-defense, but now it’s bigger than that.  Chud could only have gotten a bail that high if he was much more dangerous than say, someone who was charged with first degree murder and aggravated assault.

Unless, you know, he was a white guy who said racist stuff on the Internet and it’s a high profile case.  That must be it.  Surely the system punishes white people and black people the same?

Huh.  I guess not.

And note that Chud will get zero support from mainstream groups dedicated to, say, defending those who want to promote free speech or the right to self-defense.  I could keep going.  But keep in mind that Karmello Anthony, who murdered Austin Metcalf by stabbing him in the chest has been out on $250,000 bail for nearly a year.

A system is what it does.

Think back to various high-profile self defense cases.  Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny were both acquitted of homicide, but what did their trials cost?  $1 million?  $2 million?  What about the Modern Sporting Lawyer who was arrested for protecting his home during the George Floyd Riots?  He pled to a deal.

No, what’s on trial is the ability for individuals to defend themselves, but a very special group of individuals:  white guys.  If you can’t be convicted, it doesn’t matter.  They’ll run you through the ringer of a court case costing millions if you don’t want to go to jail for the rest of your life.  And if you win?  Well, you’re broke, and the process was the punishment.  But if you’re black?

This is not the case if you’re black.  Stab away if you think there’s a good chance he might say a slur after you try to kill him.  And if you’re black you can try to fake a hate crime and the school you go to will cover up for you.

The statistics are clear:

This is so clear I’ll let Mr. Obvious point it out:

And I think the goal is also obvious:

There’s more to this story.  This is only one aspect.  Remember, a system is what it does.  What does the system react most strongly to?  What does it punish the hardest?

Novelty vs. Routine: The One Line Every Man Must Guard Or Watch His Life Slip Away

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.  Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.  I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.  All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” – Bladerunner

And to everyone who said I couldn’t do standup, well, I see you’re not laughing now.

Routine is where life goes to die.

On reflection the other day I was a bit amused to note how much of my life is on autopilot. I have three pairs of pants that are all the same that I wear for work that are identical in cut, color, and comfort, so I never have to stand in front of the closet wondering what matches what.  I have six shirts that rotate on my torso for daily wear, each one as unremarkable as the last.  I get up, generally, within one minute of the same time each day, and the Wildermobile™ hits the pavement within the same thirty seconds each workday.  I have cigars three times a week, on the same days and at the same approximate time, rain or shine, good mood or bad.

Why three times a week?

Well, because insurance says that means I’m a non-smoker.  It’s a loophole I’m happy to exploit, and it keeps the premiums from getting as high as Johnny Depp jumping on Mount Everest.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I set those things up on purpose.  I figure I have only so much energy to make decisions each day, so why not save it up and also pre-make decisions for the time I’m stupidest each day?  For me, that’s in the morning when I get up.  Brush teeth first, pants second, and if I’m lucky they’re on my legs and not as a unique set of chestless arm chaps.  No debate, no drama, just forward motion.

It’s like giving my brain a head start on the real work that comes later.  This makes sense to me. Efficient.  Practical.  The kind of system a man builds when he realizes life is long on demands and short on spare mental horsepower.

But.

I get concerned sometimes that I’ve pre-programmed life a bit too much, and created too much of a routine.  The reason I’m concerned is that all of those minutes faced with nothing novel or consequential happening slip away like the replicant played by Rutger Hauer says in Blade Runner:  “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

And the mostest lostest will be those moments where I was living life on routine, putting one foot in front of the other with hours of my life slipping by on autopilot.  The coffee is hot, the drive is the exact same stretch of highway, the cigar smoke curls up exactly as it did last Tuesday.  Comfortable, yes.

But is comfort the same as living?

Time is really one of the biggest fascinations of my life. Even as a kid, I was obsessed with the idea that something new is only bright and shiny when it’s brand new, and after a certain amount of damage it simply can’t be made to look new again.  It wears.  It gets scratched and dinged, and none of that is, short of melting it down and remaking it new again, reversible.

Time does that to everything, including us.  I can go back to the home I left this morning, but I can’t go back to this morning.  It’s a lost country, a place where I can only go in my memory. Gone.

Irretrievable.

And what if every morning is the same for a thousand days?  Haven’t I just compressed all of my life into one single Groundhog Day, with the only exception that I’m getting older, less shiny and new?  Less naïve?  Less innocent?

The calendar pages flip, but the days bleed together into one long, grey blur.

I wake up, I do the things, I go to bed, and suddenly a decade has vanished while I was busy being responsible.

The flip side of routine is novelty.

I remember the first night I met The Mrs., the way the room felt electric and the conversation refused to end.  I remember my first car.  I remember my first touchdown.  I remember my last day of college.

I remember building the first Pinewood Derby® car with The Boy and the last one with Pugsley. Those moments and milestones that make up the peaks and valleys of life.  Those, certainly, have made my life longer.  Not in years, but in the way that life stretches when something real happens.  I remember those moments intensely.

There’s a fine line, though.

If my life is nothing but novelty, then what chance do I have of creating something useful, of establishing meaning with my life?

There is none.

Chaos is where life goes to lose meaning.  One wild distraction after another, no anchor, no progress, just a pinball existence bouncing from shiny object to shiny object until nothing sticks and nothing matters.

If my life is always routine, I’m pushing every bit of meaning away, becoming a grey man in a gray room on a grey house on a gray hill.  Everything blends.  Nothing stands out.  The days stack up like identical bricks in a wall you can’t see over, and one day I realize the wall is my life and I built it yourself.

I have this thought, mainly because Pugsley is mostly on his own now.  I figure the time when I’ve spent half of the hours I’ll ever spend with him was sometime in 2015 or 2016.  He’s now out in the world.

That realization sneaks up on a father like a quiet thief.  No warning bell when the halfway mark passes.  I just look up one day and notice the house is quieter, the schedule has gaps, and the kid you taught to ride a bike is suddenly navigating highways I’ll never drive.

It forces the question:  so what now?

Again, routine is where life goes to die, and chaos is where life goes to lose its meaning.

Routine is Scylla; Chaos, Charybdis. I love it when I work a semicolon into a sentence!

We paddle between the two monsters, trying not to get devoured by either.  Too much of one and we drown in sameness.  Too much of the other and we drown in noise.

I think we as a culture are caught between these two monsters right now.  We have chaos in the never-ending rise of technological advancement, which at the same time turns faces toward the black mirrors in their hands, where they take the cold comfort of doomscrolling their life away in an endless sea of other people’s outrage and other people’s highlights.  Every notification promises novelty with a new opinion that will surely change everything.

But it doesn’t.

It just scrolls.

The phone lights up, the brain lights up, and another slice of irreplaceable time disappears into the glow.  We’ve engineered a world that offers infinite novelty at the cost of any real depth, and we wonder why so many feel hollow.

Reality, I think, is part of the antidote. Writing is, for me. Sure, I do it on a routine:  same time, same chair, same keyboard, but each post is something different.  Each one starts from a fresh thought, a fresh observation, a fresh wrestle with whatever corner of life is nagging at me that week.

It’s routine that (mostly) invites novelty instead of smothering it.

And getting out and accomplishing something in the physical world is also important, too.  Building something with my hands. Moving my body until it complains and then keeps going anyway.  These things don’t just fill time; they mark it.

They leave evidence that I was here, that I did something that outlasts the doomscroll.

The balance isn’t perfect and it never will be. Some days the routine wins because the world demands it.  Other days novelty crashes in whether I wanted it or not.

The trick, I’m learning, is to guard the line between them like it’s the most important border in your life.  Protect enough routine to keep the engine running and enough novelty to keep the engine pointed somewhere worth going.

Because time doesn’t wait for us to figure it out.  It keeps moving, wearing us down, turning shiny new mornings into well-worn afternoons.

And if I’m going to lose moments like tears in rain, I’d rather a few of them be the kind worth remembering:  sharp, vivid, and undeniably mine, than a thousand identical ones that blur together into nothing at all.

Dr. Michael Burry Has Spoken Again. The End Is Nigh, Or Margot Robbie’s Thigh?

“On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” – Fight Club

A truck filled with quinoa and a truck filled with Worcestershire sauce crashed into a charcuterie shop near my house.  What was the result?  It’s kind of hard to say. (meme as found)

Dr. Michael Burry has spoken again.  Okay, actually more like “emailed again” but he’s on the record again saying that the the end is nigh.  Is he right?  Well, on a long enough timeline, entropy always wins, and the heat death of the universe doesn’t care about my 401(k) yields.

But are we close?

The S&P valuations are through the roof.  We’re in the middle of the largest investment in the history of the United States outside of World War II:  Artificial Intelligence.

More has been spent on A.I. than was spent on the Manhattan Project, but less than was spent on, well, insert whatever outrageous bill Congress passed last week while you weren’t looking—probably something involving green energy subsidies for gluten-free solar panels raised free-range by Antifa® Chapter 4077.

The payoff for winning the Second World War was a big one.  Essentially the United States was surrounded by a smoking crater of a world.  Our industries were ready to absorb all the G.I.’s returning with their war brides into job to rebuild that crater.  I mean rebuild the nice parts, not India.

The world without Western Civilization. (meme as found)

Factories were humming, houses were sprouting like dandelions, and the economy was so robust you could afford a house on a single blue-collar paycheck and still take the kids to Disney World® without having to resort to Moustitution© or selling a kidney.  That’s what we got for entering into the war late and avoiding any of it happening on our homeland.

But what is the prize if A.I. is successful?

Well, it’s negative jobs.  It’s a profusion of information so vast it makes the Library of Alexandria look like a collection of Post-it® notes abandoned after spelling errors.  Elon Musk thinks it will create a society of abundance so great that no one will have to work and everyone can have a cool penthouse and all the gold they can eat.  We can be sure he’s right, because this is just how the Industrial Revolution ended.

Wait, what?

Hours worked went up?  Rural agrarian lifestyles were traded for urban factory hellscapes where the owner of the factory charged extra for all the asbestos he let you breathe in?  Yeah.

Every production “revolution” that the world has seen has actually increased human effort.  Those leaps forward did increase material wealth, but they also led to humans having to work more.  Hunting nomad chads became farming incels.

Why?

You can’t brew booze if you don’t have the grain and the place to brew it.  So, just like me, the nomads decided to give up a lifestyle of hunting, fishing, sex, and leisure for all the beer they could drink.  I mean, I have priorities.

As a child I never napped.  I was resisting a rest.  (meme as found)

I don’t expect anything different in the Thought Revolution.  Nobody will get free stuff, but the world will need a lot fewer of us.  This is the case if it is successful:  essentially an entire civilization working overtime to create a replacement for itself.

Yikes!

But let’s say it doesn’t work.

That’s better, right?  Well, maybe.  A bit.  If A.I. reaches some limit where it becomes economically unfeasible to get to the next level (think power generation capability required being infinite) of cognition, or the models start to get dumber the more advanced they are (there’s a fashion model joke in here somewhere, but I’m too polite to make it), then the stock market will collapse.

Collapse?  Surely, John Wilder, you exaggerate.  No, I meant collapse.  The market has priced in that A.I. is going to work.  On the recent day that Wall Street hit new highs in the S&P 500, most (55%!) stocks weren’t near their highs.  The high is high, but it’s not broad.  This current level of investment in A.I. is so big and so deep and so tall, there is no way it can do anything but fall.

Sorry, got a bit of Seuss stuck in my keyboard.

“Oh me! Oh my!” said the plumber named Fred,
“My pipes cost a fortune, I’m deep in the red!
I can’t fix the sink or the tub or the drain!
This copper’s so pricey, it’s driving me insane!”

This is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario.  Let me put on my Cassandra pants and throw out this idea: Why not both?

The economy is screwed, or at least the economy that I grew up with is screwed.  We’re becoming poor at a fantastic clip.  Not “poor” as in West Virginia moonshiner with a still and a shotgun, but “poor” as in living like we’re in a crowded megacity filled with unwashed brown people where the air smells like regret and curry.

Let’s look at how affordable things are compared to income from the 1970s. I found this handy chart on the Internet.  You know the one:  houses, cars, healthcare, education all marching upward while real wages stagnate like a sloth on Ambien.  Now, I know that no one actually goes to movie theaters anymore even though it’s on the chart.  There’s no point in going to the movie.  I can get booze from my fridge and pause the movie whenever I want if I watch it at home, but yet it’s “indecent” if I fall asleep drunk and in my underwear in the front row at the latest Avatar™ movie.

(as found)

But everyone can still afford a place to live, right?

Well, not since we’ve opened the floodgates and let in the entire world.  A massive population increase combined with a group of people that consume much more in services than they contribute is killing us.  They’re actually making us poorer as each one crosses into the country.

Remember in math you can always raise per capita by lowering the number of capitas.

But, hey, they borrow money so they can create debt that produces profit for the banks, right?  Win-win, except for the natives footing the bill.

Isn’t enough that our economy is as stable as a knife fight between a drunken Whoopi Goldberg and a blindfolded Jimmy Kimmel in a bikini atop a butter-coated teeter-totter on top of WTC7?  Did we have to put the whole existence of humanity in the future in the balance, too?

The good news, I guess, is that Burry could be wrong.  He has been wrong before.  Like me, he’s predicted five of the last two recessions.  But there comes a point where we won’t be able to paper over the cracks in the structure with more printed money and hopium.

Yup, been there, done that.

When all this cracks, and it will because complexity plus leverage plus narrative equals fragility, the reset won’t be gentle.  It won’t be “buy the dip” and back to brunch.  It will be the kind of event that makes 2008 look like a mild correction and 1929 look like a Tuesday.

So where do I want to be when it happens?  I want to be listening to a twenty-something Margot Robbie describing what collateralized debt obligations are from a bubble bath.

And remember Wilder’s Rule of Humorous Collapse #6:  civilizations don’t fail because they run out of money; they fail because they run out of reality.

But at least I finally understand collateralized debt obligations (warning, mildly spicy language).

Disclaimer:  I am not Margot Robbie, though I would take a cameo to talk about philosophy in a movie from my hot tub while I smoke cigars, and am also not a professional anything, let alone your financial advisor, so please bang your head against the wall a dozen times before you take the advice of an unpaid Internet humorist.